A post by Brendan Joy, a student on our MSc. in Public Policy and Human Development, who just won a place on a social enterprise programme in Ireland. NB, the next deadline for applications to our UN-backed double-degree Master’s programme is 15 July 2020. … Bees and other pollinators like butterflies are declining globally, their numbers now in freefall. Climate change, habitat loss, industrialised agriculture, and the use of harmful chemicals form a deadly cocktail that threatens their s...

There’s a saying in English: “Necessity is the mother of invention” – but this has always struck me as incomplete. Necessity is also the mother of innovation, i.e. a novelty that generates a profit or something of value for a community, as in a social innovation. What follows is the story of our drive for community engagement and nudge therapy, amid the coronavirus pandemic. Around early March 2020, I started getting the same questions from my international students in Maastricht and my NGO team...

Strangers who share one car. A network around a drug addicted youth who offer care themselves, under the guidance of a professional. A person paying back an hour of painting window frames with an hour of working in someone else’s garden. These are all examples of a more social economy, which is growing slowly but surely, also in the Netherlands. At Maastricht University, Prof. René Kemp is studying how this transition from an old to a new economy is taking shape worldwide. Working together to do...